The man who taught me to use Linux was a professor at the local
community college. He was legally blind and wore the very definition of
"coke bottle glasses". He would type a command, adjust his specs to
check it, probably find a typo, and correct it. With that set of quirks
firmly in place (every professor has their own set), I learned vim,
bash, shell scripting, telnet and ssh, MySQL, and other Linux admin
skills.

This man, whose name completely and eternally escapes me,
taught me The Ways of the Masters of Old. And though we snickered at
his myopia, and his quirky tendency to repeatedly bring up KNOPPIX
Linux specifically as a security threat (because it was one of the
first designed to run directly from an external live disk, which could
be quite the threat to data integrity back before everything on the
disk was likely to be encrypted, like it would be today), he taught me
the proper formulas and incantations necessary to engage socially with
the Masters Of Old on their own turf, and using their own tools. Tools
that come naturally to me now, and moreso than I realized. I doubt he
intended any of that, or was even fully aware of what Linux was capable
of from a "social" standpoint, even if he did know all the commands.